


Forgiveness

by infamouslastwords



Series: Poison Arrow [5]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Body Hair, Body Worship, Bottom Rick Grimes, Canon Compliant, Canon Rewrite, Choking, Daryl Dixon/Rick Grimes Feels, Daryl Dixon/Rick Grimes Smut, Deepthroating, Dirty Talk, Light Angst, M/M, Porn With Plot, Pre-Alexandria Safe-Zone (Walking Dead), Season/Series 05, Sharing Body Heat, Top Daryl Dixon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 07:56:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27689960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infamouslastwords/pseuds/infamouslastwords
Summary: “You wanted me to follow you?” The question barely a breath, almost a wish waiting to be fulfilled. Daryl swallows around a suddenly thick tongue, reassesses his grip on his bow as it lays useless against the loft’s floorboards and his side.“Yes,” he hisses, hardly daring. His free hand forms a fist, collects some scant hay into its grip. “I don’t know what to do.”Daryl succumbs to Rick's offer and contemplates the nature of forgiveness. Takes place during the barn scene in S05E10.
Relationships: Daryl Dixon/Rick Grimes
Series: Poison Arrow [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2031406
Comments: 4
Kudos: 51





	Forgiveness

“I’m sorry, My Lord. I’m sorry.”

The priest’s penitent, sorrowful voice warbles out as pellets of warm rain hit his forearms. Daryl watches with a stony face and a weak curiosity, barely feeling the miracle of this rain in the same way the others do. He is reticent even to accept this act of God, even as many other rejoice in the presumed meaning of its appearance.

As he lets it run like anything else over the tendons of his arms, the fine musculature of his fingers pointed down to the earth, Sasha and Tara lay down, prostrate, laughing in its wash of newness, cleanliness. The priest continues weeping, and Daryl clocks it as Rick’s face cracks into a rare smile, his head tilting up to the sky.

Daryl’s never been one for penance, but in his soul, he has never felt very far from the words, “Forgive me.” When he came down with a knife in his dominant hand to Merle’s addled brain—“Forgive me.” When he could not help but mourn Carol’s absence from their group, her supposed death, his inability to save her felt a lot like a cry of, “Forgive me.” Even though he has saved Rick’s life more times than he can count, the one time he was not able to after the prison, there was never a time he felt further from being worthy of forgiveness—but still the words clawed at his throat upon seeing the man alive. And Beth, when Beth died, the vengeful bullet in that cop’s brain rang out, “Forgive me.” He thinks that pretty soon he won’t know who he is apologizing to, or what he is apologizing for.

  
The barn is dry and warm, not yet affected by the drop in temperature that accompanied the incoming storm. The tendrils of his hair fall like squid legs around his cheekbones as Rick powers into the structure first, gun-cocked and flashlight shining. Carol goes, and then Daryl is right behind with his bow drawn and trigger finger jumping, smoothing the comforting manufactured plastic of the release. How many machines, how many people went into building this contraption that has kept him safe, fed him, since the beginning? And how many of them are dead now?

The others try to rest. The meager fire they manage to build is warm, so he cannot fault Carl for succumbing to sleep on its orange-glow outskirts. Next to Rick, he feels like he could sleep, too, except for the constant vigilance that sends hot wires of reflexive movements through his muscles. Even with Carol, Glenn, and Michonne around the fire, it is impossible to relax, especially as every thunderclap rings out through the empty Virginian sky above them. Even with the warning of every heaven-bright lightning strike before it.

He can’t be a part of their conversation. He can barely cling to Rick’s words, the only ones he can make out based on how close the other is to his body. The fire crackles and wanes. He is drawn to it hypnotically as probably cavemen before have been drawn defenselessly to a flame; sees in it shapes that have not yet been imagined by the human brain. Sees in it images that have long since transpired and passed. His reclining body is so rot-sweetly bruised and exhausted from use and tiredness and carrying the dead to their graves. How easy it would be to lay back, he thinks, wait for the earth to surround him in the rain-soaked mud…

A sudden thrill runs through him at the thought. He feels Rick’s iron-hot gaze on him and stirs. “When I was a kid, I asked my grandpa…” their leader starts.

He pricks his ears, spends that modicum of strength it takes to listen because he feels that this is important to the other man, somehow.

“Every day he woke up, he told himself, Rest in peace. Now get up and go to war.”

He clocks Carol and Michonne’s concerned, fevered expressions over the glow of the fire. The fire. How easy it would be to give his mind and body to it. Daryl thinks about all the desires he has swallowed, how the bleaching of each red-hot emotion has left his humanity as husky and venous as a dying leaf. He gets lost in his thoughts, lost in the fire, so it is simple sense that he starts at Glenn’s gaze. Simple that he acknowledges what is asked of him, as Rick’s unofficial second-in-command.

“We ain’t them.” He clears his throat. Rick looks over, and he finds his resolve in the deep red that reflects back on the man’s black and silvery beard. He suddenly moves, pounces, snaps a wet twig to throw into the firepit. It hisses and steams.

“We’re not them,” Rick says, reinforcing, swinging his face down to look right into Daryl’s downturned one. “Hey. We’re not.”

Daryl cannot seem to meet the other’s eyes. He breaks up more twigs absentmindedly, stands up amid another booming of thunder. Finally, he looks at Rick, almost beckoning him with the intensity of the gaze as he walks away from the fire, the group, with his crossbow in hand.

“We ain’t them.”

He feels Rick’s eyes on his back as he retreats.

…

The hayloft is airy, filled with clean atmosphere from ions in the lightning, and moves more quickly than the heavy heat below. The ladder, wooden, is a bit rotted as he ascends, but it is worth enough danger to have the space to himself; him, the shadows, the small gray tendrils of burnt wind from the firepit underneath, and whatever scant noise from murmurs that make it up there.

He decides on a corner far from the ladder, far from the others, where some hay covers the floorboards like rushes. He grunts, throws himself onto his shoulder and then rolls onto his back, trying to find stars through the slats in the paneling of the roof. It is a bit of a fool’s errand, but the cool light from the moon is a friend enough as he finally lets himself relax into the softish floorboards underneath. The fire is far enough away that just scant shadows play, and in some relative silence he tries to forget.

He doesn’t know if he’s slept at all, maybe for five minutes, before he comes-to at a rustling near the base of the ladder. It creaks as a body ascends hand over foot. He doesn’t turn to look, suppressing this instinct, and instead waits for the familiar footsteps to seek him in the far shadows of the loft.

“You look like you’re making some kind of angel up here,” comes Rick’s voice eventually. He shrugs quickly, not used to the microscope the other man makes him feel like he’s under tonight.

“No snow, dummy,” he fires back. It’s louder than he means it to be, crasser.

Rick takes it in stride, toeing off his boots. “Well, give it a few weeks. We’ll get some soon enough here in Virginia.”

A dark shadow crosses Daryl’s face, blocking out the moonlight. He closes his eyes tighter despite himself, unable to slow the beating of his heart as Rick approaches in all his gentle swagger.

“You wanted me to follow you?” The question barely a breath, almost a wish waiting to be fulfilled. Daryl swallows around a suddenly thick tongue, reassesses his grip on his bow as it lays useless against the loft’s floorboards and his side.

“Yes,” he hisses, hardly daring. His free hand forms a fist, collects some scant hay into its grip. “I don’t know what to do.”

Rick’s form hovers above him, he knows, but he cannot see it, cannot bring himself to be fully present for what he is admitting through the silent signals of his body. Crossing the threshold from trying so hard to not ask for it, to asking for it, is so plain and so revealing that he needs some guidance and semblance of security. He has tried to push it out of his mind, he realizes: Rick’s mouth, sweet-tasting and open in ecstasy, and Rick’s body tightly wound and cumming against his own as he chased after release. He had tried to forget it, forget how much he liked it for the sake of survival on the road the past months, but his own body gives him away. It shows up in every bow nock, every hand signal, every silent look from behind his disheveled bangs.

He feels himself try to suppress a writhing motion as it passes from his feet to his neck, an arch so imperceptible that surely Rick will not know, surely Rick cannot sense. Daryl knows better, though. All their time at the prison, and even before—attuned to one another’s bodies as if it were an extension of their own. So of course Rick can know, and does know.

A cool hand covers his shoulder, skin he did not know had been hot. Over him Rick has bent to place a single, firm kiss on his forehead. Their noses brush against one another’s at this inverted angle, the cooling breath through Rick’s nostrils spreading out against Daryl’s feverishly warm eyelids.

“You’re still rain-damp,” Rick murmurs in his ear, mouth close enough now to ghost over the shell. A soft lip and some beard scruff brushes the sensitive skin there, and the coiled snake in Daryl’s body fights hard against his attempts to suppress it. He clenches his fist concrete-like and hears hay crunch in his palm. “Let me help you.”

Rick circles his body lying there, ends up crouching by his shoes. One and then the other leather sheaths are pulled from the arches of his feet, placed reverently to the side. Daryl still cannot bring himself to open his eyes but feels in his bones the old, familiar care radiating off Rick’s movements, even as those palms cradle his heel to pull the sodden socks from his water-wrinkled toes. He cannot fathom how pale his feet are in the moonlight, and yet must stifle a moan when Rick presses the sole of his right foot to that bearded mouth and trails light kisses along the sensitive inner arch.

“Rick,” Daryl yelps softly. “That tickles, man.”

Rick’s rough hand sets down his foot yet lingers near the ankle, gently pushing it aside to open his canvas-clad thighs wider. On his knees, Rick’s body advances toward the crux of Daryl’s legs. He feels that cool, hooked nose bury into his crotch above the fabric of his pants and wants to jump out of his skin as the next lightning strike paints the inside of his eyelids white-bright, as the boom from the following thunderclap shakes the very floor of the loft beneath them. But Rick’s humming, murmuring some soothing sounds in his throat and Daryl can feel them against his half-hard cock, wants the creature that is pressing into his sex to take it once again into his mouth as it grows full.

“Suck me,” Daryl pleads as Rick continues his light touches. “Put your lips around it, dammit.”

He hears the low gravel of Rick’s laughter, a sound he thought had been lost forever. Feels the expert fingers work at his button and fly. The damp fabric slides over his hips haltingly, and in his impetuousness Daryl places his hands over Rick’s knuckles and pushes down. At this move his cock springs up, let free from its dampened tent. Rick’s bright gaze goes from it to his own eyes, dancing with mirth in the shadows and light thrown up from the fire far below.

Rick leans forward and all Daryl can do is anticipate it. That breath comes out of the nose again, laving the base of his cock and the surface of his balls. Even though this isn’t the first time Rick’s had his mouth near his piece, it has been a long time. Daryl cannot help but swallow the near-nauseating excitement he feels whole; a lone bird roosting, agitated, in his ribcage.

“You goddamn tease,” Daryl bites, watching Rick nuzzle his cock until it bumps up against the angle of his cheek, the fullness of his mouth. He smiles wickedly.

“Let me have some fun, brother,” Rick counters, placing his hands firmly against Daryl’s hips, which have begun to buck shallowly against his ministrations. “Don’t rush me through my favorite part.”

Daryl releases his grip on his crossbow and bends that arm back behind his skull. He covets the warmth that Rick’s lissome, bent body throws over his lower half as the other man breathes in the heady scent of him, seems to savor the listless spasms his little movements encourage. When he feels the flat plane of Rick’s tongue lap at the underside of his left bollock, that cheeky muscle moving to take him half into the warm cavern of Rick’s mouth, he winds his free hand into Rick’s dark curls and holds them fast.

“You love the taste of me that much, huh?” Daryl breathes. Rick responds by sucking harder, probing his tongue past the sack and toward the base of Daryl’s prick. Rick’s fingertips ghost rhythmically over his inner thigh, his lower stomach, moving languidly, feeling him tense and breathe. When Rick hits the perineum with the turgid tip of his tongue, the stars outside of the barn’s roof slats aren’t the only ones Daryl sees.

Rick’s mouth is a wet warmness when he finally lowers it over his head, the inner cheeks smooth and suckling. Daryl’s innards collapse in a low groan of longing, an involuntary shiver running through him. That devil tongue seeks all the veins on him that pulse full of blood, slurping mercilessly to easily bring Daryl to an almost-painful erect fullness. He winds his fingers closer into Rick’s mane, thrusting shallowly into that tight wetness. Rick’s throat descends on him, choking, gagging, but allowing him deeper, deeper. Teeth whisper against the base of his cock. He is bucking against his better judgement, unable to detach because it just feels so fucking good, and it has been so fucking long. Rick is taking it, making muted noises of animus and desire alike.

“Fuck,” Daryl moans, long and low, as that mouth removes itself slowly up his shaft and then enthusiastically descends once more. “Oh, fuck, Rick. You’re havin’ too much fun.”

Daryl allows himself to spasm once, then pulls out of Rick’s mouth completely before he spills himself too soon.

Rick’s flushed face hovers close to his piece, taking recovering breaths that quickly even themselves out. A bit of precum dribbles down the side of Daryl’s sucked-red cock. Rick’s eyes, which had been closed during his careful attentions, are now fully open and focused on that line of gossamer fluid. Daryl raises himself up on his right elbow, releasing Rick’s hair as the other pulls his hips cheekily, hungrily toward him by the unfasted belt around his thighs. He worries the scrape against the floorboards will alert the others, but Rick has the face of a man not easily frightened—his face now, all hewn from stone and knowing exactly what it is he wants.

“You’re not where I left you.”

Daryl cocks his head. Rick moves closer, face looming closer in the strike of lightning that blinks out above them. He waits until the thunder follows, deafening, before continuing.

“At the church—I left you somewhere, and it ain’t where you are now. If I’d known that was our last night…” Rick shakes his head, then reaches down to his prick. He takes the drip of precum onto his finger, and, to Daryl’s satisfaction, licks it off. Daryl shudders at the intensity, the microscope he feels put under once again by those eyes, until the lips below meet his own and press down hard enough for teeth to be felt through the flesh. He tastes his own salt on Rick’s tongue, meets the fury of the kiss with his own until he cannot take it and pulls Rick down by his forearms, throws him to the floorboards, covers his body with his own in the swift and practiced actions of a hunter.

“You miss havin’ a good fuckin’?” Daryl pants against Rick’s mouth, forcefully snaking his arm between them to grasp at Rick’s belt buckle and undo it. “I’ll give it to you real good, then.”

As Daryl latches his mouth onto the dirt-stained skin of Rick’s neck and Rick lets out an unabashed moan, they hear a faint call from below.

“Everything all right up there, Daryl?”

Carol.

“Yeah,” Daryl manages, strangled. “Yeah, just a damn barn animal up here with me is all. Go back to the fire.”

Rick laughs silently and reaches down to meet Daryl’s hand, pulling his prick free to strain against Daryl’s own. During Daryl’s momentary defenselessness the other man nips at his earlobe and jugular, pushing back the tendrils of dark hair with his other hand to gain better purchase to the raw skin there.

As he dips his head to allow for the other man’s mouth to make good on its bid, Daryl wonders, not for the first time, _Would the others care?_ He thinks of telling Carol, maybe, the way she would smile in that small way of hers and brush his cheek quickly with her thumb. _Sweet man_ , she’d say. _Of course that’s okay. He treating you good?_

He would nod. He’d tell her, _I feel safe._

One of Rick’s bites draws blood, and the prickle of pain excites Daryl into motion. He flips Rick over onto his stomach, pulling that signature dark denim down over scarred and tanned haunches. Daryl sweeps down, roughly sinking his teeth into one slim cheek before kissing gently, wetly, a line to Rick’s asshole. He forcefully palms Rick’s prick with one hand while keeping the cheek spread with the other as he laves at the puckered skin there, spitting into it and pressing quickly past it with his tongue. He smirks at the small tremors of pleasure that make Rick unsteady on his knees when he draws him up to them, fully exposing that tight hole to his view. He spits on it again, releasing Rick’s turgid cock to grip firmly onto his slim hips.

“Back up on my fingers—yeah,” Daryl murmurs, encouraging. “Just like that. Let’s stretch that pretty little hole out.” He delves two fingers in and waits for Rick to get used to it again, waits for the warmth to move around him and accept him. His cock is throbbing painfully now at the feeling of the ring of muscle holding tight to his digits, and the sounds Rick is trying hard to quiet but show up on the white edges of knuckles against the floorboards, the erratic eagerness of his shoves back onto Daryl’s hand.

He slips in a third finger and plunges them deeper. Rick’s now visibly shaking, a quiver that runs up the stark muscle of his lean thighs.

“You still able to fill me all the way up?” Rick asks quietly, breath labored, throwing his already sweat-soaked mane out of his eyes to meet Daryl’s half-lidded gaze.

Daryl suppresses a growl and can’t help but smirk again, moving his fingers apart and enjoying the way Rick’s brow knits in pleasure-pain. “You want it? I can give it to you, darlin’. Jus’ tell me what you want.”

Rick bends, allowing a hand to free from holding up his own weight, slithering it down to touch himself. Daryl groans inwardly at the sight of it, his cock jumping against the thin air. As the rain starts outside the barn roof, dripping onto them there amid hale gusts of wind, Rick’s stone eyes are on fire.

“I want all of you.”

Daryl is awestruck, unable to piece together two coherent thoughts, movements. Then he pulls his fingers out and spits on his hand, lathering the tip of his cock in saliva and precum. It isn’t hard to coat; it had been weeping openly, straining to make purchase inside Rick. He lays it against Rick’s hole and teases the ring of muscle there, bridles Rick’s aggressive attempts at pushing onto him by holding those hips at bay with his sinewy forearms. When he allows one of these moves to take his cock’s head in, Rick takes it in whole. He digs his nails into Rick’s hipbones, muffling a terse grunt, and sees Rick’s hand wrench into a fist.

“Deeper,” Rick eventually murmurs. Daryl can’t help but oblige him, angling down and slipping in bit by agonizing bit. His head lolls back involuntarily: it is as sweet as he remembers it, this ass. He could cum so quickly if he let himself. But all he wants is to feel it as long as possible, wants Rick to feel every movement he makes inside of him, reaching deeper, filling him up.

Just halfway in Daryl pulls out slightly, repositions so when he grabs Rick’s upper arms, he is able to pull the man’s back to his chest and slip in deeper in one seamless movement. Rick squirms, twining their left calves together in an attempt to get leverage to push back onto Daryl’s cock. Daryl only lets him do so much, making a maddeningly shallow rhythm that brings a red heat flush to Rick’s neck. Daryl kisses the hot skin there, licks the sweat and brings his teeth down to nibble as he pumps up into Rick’s ass.

“D’you love my dick inside this ass?” Daryl growls into Rick’s ear, winding a hand up to loosely hold the other man’s arching esophagus. “You miss it?” He chokes him as he dares go deeper with his thrusts, restraining Rick and keeping him close at the same time.

“Fuck—yes—” comes the shaky reply. “I fucking—love—it.”

“You love this dick,” Daryl squeezes harder, “and my hand around your throat. Bet you’re dyin’ to hear me call you my whore, aren’t you?”

Rick’s gratified laugh is stifled by Daryl’s grip, and then the sound is bitten in half by a surprised moan as Daryl sinks his cock in nearly to the hilt.

“Your—whore—is the only—one—who can make you—like this,” Rick rasps. “Draw you—out.”

Daryl is unsure why, but a surge of latent violence in him churns and rises at the sudden, stark disclosure of this truth. In the glow of another strike of lightning he pulls out of Rick entirely, lets go of the man’s throat and arms, leaving him to catch himself on one palm against the floorboards with a look of shock over his shoulder at Daryl’s sudden withdrawal.

Parted from the other man and bereft of his warmth, Daryl starts to rip his vest and shirt off, and finish his pants’ movement down his thighs to remove them completely, over the feet which Rick has already bared to the air.

“Well?” Daryl fires, on two legs in all God’s glory. “Get naked.”

Rick is staring, unsure, and then he is not; he is moving hurriedly to rid himself of his own clothing, too. Daryl watches the uncovered, wan plane of muscle underneath the downy chest; the crux of two lithe legs and the twitching manhood stood there in its pilose nest. He runs his eyes over all the character this body has accrued in the form of bullet holes, wine-red scratches, brown ghosts of healed wounds; the cadaver indents from malnourishment, from walking-weary muscles. All of it now covered by a misting of rain, from gusts that shake the ceiling above them and whip cool water over their skin.

Daryl stands and crosses the space between them, bare feet padding noiselessly over the rain sodden floorboards. He reaches out to slide his hand over Rick’s damp left jawbone, cupping it close as he draws the other’s forehead to press against his own. Their bodies seal against one another and Rick’s contented breaths make for a comforting sound that reinforces whatever remembered gentleness wells inside Daryl now. He tilts Rick’s chin up, fumbling a bit with the kiss before Rick rights the rhythm. He isn’t used to it. He can’t get the hang of it without Rick’s help. He can’t be free to dominate without the subtle lead of Rick’s submission.

With this tender kiss stolen he lowers Rick onto his back, quickly shielding the naked body beneath him with his own. Rick’s hands both come up to grab his jaw. They hold his face how he can only assume is like a lover’s, and as he begins to fuck savagely into Rick’s opening, they entwine their tongues in the heat of sex building between them.

“Is that better?” Daryl asks, genuine, before Rick pulls his mouth back down to him and laves into it with a skilled tongue. Daryl sinks into the sweetness there, his head spinning from the heavy euphony of their ministrations. “It’s right, isn’t it? Being bare for each other again.”

Rick’s eyes are half-lidded from Daryl’s attention, his maddeningly circular hip movements that push him deeper and deeper into the Rick’s tight heat. Rick is stretched now and accepting his arching hardness, panting and pushing against him in time with his measured thrusts. Sharing breath, they can barely keep their eyes from falling closed to the pleasure of it, from the static building and pooling in their bellies.

They manage to keep their eyes open for a last kiss, sloppy and wet, and Daryl buries his face into Rick’s damp neck as he pumps with abandon. “I wanted to feel you like this again,” Daryl lowers. “Rick, I wanted you. So bad.”

Rick’s fingers softly weave their way into his fringe, pulling, and those benevolent arms wrap around his shoulders, cradling him close. Daryl has Rick’s hips pinned under his palms, under the weight of his body, mercilessly driving toward that point he knows makes Rick beautifully feral. He can remember the first time he hit it, the surprise he felt at seeing Rick like that—disheveled, in ecstasy. He drives his cock in up to the hilt and tries to recreate that feeling for him, tries to make it so Rick forgets. Forgets their dead, forgets even his own name.

“Daryl,” Rick chokes into his ear, a sound hurried, frenzied. “Daryl—right there—”

He scoops Rick’s hips up and delves without thought into the spot he is instructed to. The other is shaking with the wanton need he is edging toward. Daryl feels the tight hole constrict around his cock and wants to give it to him hard, fast, give it to Rick so good that the other man won’t be conscious for a few sweet seconds after release—his whole body buzzing and twitching with the rapture of pleasure. He grasps Rick’s neglected sex with his palm, tries to align his thrusts with his hand’s massaging rhythm. The pressure in him is almost unbearable, almost too much to hold back. But he can hold back for as long as it takes to see Rick the way he has wanted to see him for weeks now: open, surrendering, spent.

“I’m so close—don’t stop,” comes the sweet supplication. Daryl laves at Rick’s bent neck and bites the skin there until he can taste copper, fucks without mercy in his hips until he feels the familiar tightening from Rick’s body, the whole mortal coil wound in on itself.

“Don’t stop,” Rick repeats, silly from the physical bliss of it, unaware of his own open mouth. Daryl can’t help himself—he bends to take Rick’s lips in his own again, sucks and probes past, and contains the exit of such unintelligible sounds of pleasure. Pleasure he is creating, he knows. The thought alone is enough to take Daryl over the edge.

“I’m gonna—” the leader in his arms whispers, probably unaware of the words leaving his hot mouth. “I’m gonna cum,” he promises, somewhere beyond the realm of consciousness, pressing down erratically to meet Daryl’s heated thrusts until he’s spasming, until his body shakes and a lone, long sigh emits from a mouth that Daryl quickly covers, until he’s making their stomachs and the webbing of Daryl’s right hand sticky with his milky seed. Until those bright blue eyes roll back and that back arches and all Daryl can do is watch, triumphant.

He only watches for a second, as a second is enough to send himself careening into the bottomless pit of release. He pumps weakly into Rick’s hole, biting back a yelp, as he was not aware of how bad he needed it. To quiet himself he fixes his teeth again on Rick’s bony shoulder—Rick, whose body is still sighing, heaving, twitching with pleasure.

They lay, contented, until a few minutes pass in which they are able to gain their bearings again. Daryl rolls off Rick to lay on his side, making sure to keep Rick close to him and his own heat as the storm rages outside, above them. How long had they been tangled up in one another? Daryl can’t know, no matter how hard he tries to place the timing of all their movements. All that is there is the blur of rain-slick flesh in the faint firelight, the faint moonlight.

Quietly, Rick stirs against him. That bearded mouth seeks purchase with his own—it laves at his neck as though it is an afterthought, as though reaching incrementally toward the real prize of his two rough lips. He obliges, bending, placing a guiding hand on that beard-buried jawbone, taking the other’s mouth in a galvanizing kiss that doesn’t need its rhythm calibrated in the slightest. Gotten used to it, Daryl has. Won the prize of the man sighing against him, sated.

The rain still pounds down against the scant roof above them—all chill and freshness, how rain is supposed to be. Daryl opens his mouth and some droplets find their way past his lips to the flat plane of his tongue. He admires the taste for a few moments before turning over to take in Rick’s face and the body that is still so securely woven into his arms.

“What’re you huggin’ me for?” Rick asks, sleepy and screwy. “I’m the one who should be.”

Daryl swallows. “I don’t know, brother. Just… relieved, I guess.”

Rick sighs and the exhale is one long note. “Yeah. This doesn’t feel real, y’know?”

Daryl hums in acknowledgement. He pulls Rick closer to his core heat, his human warmth, burying his nose behind Rick’s ear.

“Yeah—but it is,” he manages to counter. The stars shine starkly out there now, with the sun fully set. Even the narrow slats of the barn’s roof lets in light from them, past the overcast storm clouds. “We just did that. You’re here, naked. Your ass full’a my cum.”

Rick laughs lowly and rolls over to press his side fully into Daryl’s, throwing his thigh over Daryl’s own. The closeness brings familiarity, stirs Daryl’s spent cock sorely into half-arousal again.

“Yeah. Yeah—you’re right, Daryl. You fucked me real good.”

Daryl shivers. He adjusts his grip on Rick’s arm, the hand of which has been making a slow and tender migration down his stomach. “You keep talking like that and I’ll have to do something about it,” he warns.

Rick’s hand reaches his prick, teases into the hair at its base.

“It’s just,” the other man’s voice is a ghost in his ear, the timbre of it low, “you make me want it so bad.” The hand grips the base of his cock tightly, and he feels it twitch toward fullness with an inward groan. “I can’t wait weeks again, Daryl. We didn’t do anythin’ out there, not even at night. Fuck, you’re too damn…” he pauses, seemingly searching for the right word.

But Daryl doesn’t give him time to find it. Using a lazy, leonine stretch to simultaneously take the hand from his cock and pin both Rick’s arms above his head, he once again covers Rick’s body whole, pressing him to the damp floorboards. The move is slow but strong, and meets no resistance. He lowers his mouth to take Rick’s lips, silencing him, pushing past them to taste fully whatever meaning he can glean from the afterthought of those words. Soon Rick is bucking into his hips, the rhythm almost involuntary.

“You _are_ just a barn animal, aren’t you?” Daryl asks with a playful mirth. But Rick’s face is all stone and seriousness again, so his expression fades into a sober sort of contemplation, into another long and lilting kiss. When they separate, Rick is giving him a look that merits silence, that demonstrates a certain unspoken gravity.

“Important,” Rick finally states, brushing Daryl’s cheek with his palm. Their eyes lock and Daryl knits his brows, not understanding.

Rick sees this, continues, “You’re too damn important to me, Daryl.”

Daryl stares, his gaze uncomprehending. Even he knows how frustrating it is that he looks like this; he is nothing, from nowhere. How is he supposed to show how much he cares?

Finally, “It won’t be the last time,” he growls. Rick’s eyes don’t meet his. “Hey,” he emphasizes, pushing into Rick’s hips with his own. “It won’t be.”

Rick lays prostrate, takes it, then brushes Daryl from him so much like he would sluice water from his skin. Daryl can only watch, suddenly bereft, as Rick fumbles for his clothing: for his soaked shirt and ruined pants.

“I’m gonna go back down. To the fire.”

Daryl is unmoving as time unfurls like a loosened sheet in front of him, as the barn shakes with wind and thunder alike. “Yeah,” he finally answers, when it has become too much. “Yeah, I should go do a sweep.”

Yet he is still naked as Rick stands eventually, fully dressed, to wind his thick gun belt around his lower belly and back. They have not met eyes once for all these seconds, despite what has just happened; despite the fact they wanted what just happened to happen again.

“Well, okay then,” Rick demurs in that soft Georgian accent. Daryl feels some integral part of himself collapse.

“Yeah. Go down first,” he assents, predicting the hesitation, the windy distance between them. “Go back down by the fire, by Carl. I’ll make the first sweep in a minute.”

Out of Rick’s peripherals comes a pointed look. “Okay,” the other man says, then flings his slim leg over the top rung of the ladder to the hayloft. He descends without another word.

Alone, again, Daryl feels his throat tighten. He draws a single knee to his chest and shakes with the effort of trying to hold something back, or in, or together, until he can hear that Rick has made it down the ladder and back to the ring of flames, back to the ring of comrades waiting for the faintest desire of sleep to whisper in their ears.

Then, like this, Daryl dresses. He pulls ragged hem after ragged hem onto his limbs and throws the crossbow over his shoulder. He does not wonder about it,about he and Rick and the meaning of their fucking, anymore. He just wires himself back into that old groove, knits all his muscles in preparation for the wildest unknown his imagination can present itself with.

And that is how he prowls around the edges of the barn. That is how he behaves until he reaches the buckling doors wound shut with just one short link of chain through the rotting wood. Until the lightning illuminates the dozens of dead hands trying to make purchase past the chain.

The others are smart in their perceptions, and quick to come aid him. He throws his shoulder up against the door, presses both his palms flat against the rain-slippery rotten wood, and no sooner is Maggie, then Sasha, there. Then Rick is running, followed by Glenn, Michonne, and Carol. Their hands knit together against the force of the dead pushing in on them, desperately trying to anchor their heels in the slippery mud of the barn floor.

Daryl searches for the man he left things so unresolved with in these moments that might be final. The thrill of that, even, is gone for him—he does not feel the chill from death, anymore. As he realizes this, Rick’s eyes meet his, immediate, between their comrades holding the line. Daryl wants to say it again, but feels the moment has passed; or maybe the moment has always been understood and the words, now, are unnecessary.

However it may be, the barn doors give a thousand death rattles; it takes everyone’s might, and hours, to keep the barn doors from splintering open. To Daryl is only takes seconds—and then, it takes ages.

They hold it until they can’t, then they keep holding. Then, eventually, they don’t have to.

The wind stops howling. Lightning ceases, and thunder follows it down the corridor of the wide forest outside until nothing rumbles and jumps of its own accord. Until a light blue dawn starts to break.

One by one, they fall back to the floor and against their respective pairs. Glenn and Maggie; Abraham and Rosita. Now it is only he and Rick—the other man exhausted, shivering. As the others find purchase with unconsciousness, Rick falls to his knees.

Daryl is the last one standing as he was the first, and still so full of kinetic energy.

He watches Rick crawl into the dirt where Carl had left Judith, watches him press his face into the bundle of her blankets. Is he crying? Daryl cannot look long enough to tell. He paces over, quick, grabs Rick by the upper arm and lifts him away from his daughter, takes him to a far corner, to a softer place, and lets him down. All the others are not there, anymore, and not even his own terseness could take them from the weariness of their own bones. They sleep.

Carefully, with every last drop of gentleness left in him, Daryl bends to scoop up Judith’s bundle of blankets, Judith’s powdery heat, into his bare arms. He loves holding her, like the others love to hold her—that reminder, that primal need of protection fulfilled.

Smelling her head, he cradles her close as he walks over to Rick’s prostrate form. In the shadows the man looks haggard, looks older than his years with that beard so white-stark on his olive skin. He has tracks running through the dirt of his cheeks, is reaching his arms up to Daryl in a way that Daryl finds foreign—because he does not, because he cannot, know.

He passes Judith’s form into Rick’s outstretched arms. Rick accepts her brokenly. He presses his face into that bundle again, shoulders shaking with relief.

No one is watching. Daryl wants to, he wants to close the distance between them and let it be known one more time. He cannot hold back from feeling this way. So hesitantly, carefully, he reaches down to place his palm against Rick’s cheek, and this time it is his cool skin that meets feverish warmth. Rick pushes toward Daryl’s palm, as a horse nuzzles gratefully into the hand of the person who feeds it. So Daryl tilts that jaw up, bends on one knee to meet that mouth with his own. The kiss tastes of salt tears and sweat, but Rick’s lips cling to his and press against his in an open-mouthed desperation. It is like nothing they have ever shared before, this kiss. It is something like love, Daryl thinks—it is something like the conversation they were having back at the base of the church, before he went off to follow Carol. Daryl feels Rick breathing through his tears, kissing back tenderly.

_I don’t think you touch just anyone the way you touch me._

And Daryl doesn’t. He hasn’t.

They part and Rick bows his head into Judith’s blankets, his other hand blindly searching for Carl’s sleeping form in the dirt near to him, finding the boot-covered foot and grabbing the toes with white knuckles.

Daryl can only stare as he backs away. He is not a part of this, he feels; only the precipitation to this. He settles and watches from the far wall for signs of their sleep—Carol's, Tara's, and Carl's, but also signs of Rick’s sleep. He is fixing the yellow-pink music box with idle hands as the sun starts to rise and turn his lover’s cheek pure orange-purple.

He carefully winds the gear, holds it up to his ear. The ballerina turns, and a sweet sound escapes.

This time, Daryl does not have to ask for forgiveness.


End file.
